I. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to communication systems and, in particular, to systems and methods for determining addresses.
II. Background and Material Information
A firewall protects the resources of a private network from users (or computers) of other, untrusted networks. The firewall may consist of a set of programs that regulate the flow of traffic into and out of a network. The set of programs may include rules that represent a security policy for the firewall. For example, an enterprise with an intranet that allows its workers access to the wider Internet may install a firewall to control access to the enterprise's own private data resources and to control what outside Internet resources the enterprise's users may access. A firewall may also include (or work with) a proxy server that makes network requests (i.e., to establish connections and exchange packets) on behalf of intranet users. In some situations, a firewall may be a specially designated computer separate from the rest of the computers on a network, such that no incoming packets (or connections) from or to an untrusted network can directly access computers on the enterprise's intranet.
Since a firewall essentially serves to control the flow of packets between a trusted network (e.g., an enterprise or corporate intranet) and an untrusted network (e.g., the Internet), the firewall may be burdened with a large amount of network traffic. To address problems that flow from significant network traffic some have used a firewall cluster. The firewall cluster includes a plurality of firewalls (also referred to as firewall nodes). By using multiple firewall nodes, the firewall cluster can handle more traffic as compared to a single firewall node. However, the introduction of firewall clusters presents unique problems, such as coordinating the activities of all of the firewall nodes in the cluster.